SEO or advertising?
Influencer marketing or MetaSearch Engines.
Or again, a new booking engine as opposed to an Attribute-based selling system, a better reporting tool, or email automation.
You see, Sales is Sales; Revenue management is Revenue management; Housekeeping is Housekeeping… but what if I ask: “what is Marketing?”
Because when it comes to defining marketing, here situation becomes way more difficult, especially in the hotel industry, because whilst on one side we share marketing disciplines with other business sectors, on the other side the industry implies something that is actually quite unique and quite more complex, if you think about, for example, MetaSearch Engines or even Hotel Distribution.
And so, in the previous video I asked the question: “if you’re giving a certain budget, let’s say 10,000 – 50,000 – 100,000 $€£, how do you spend it? How do you decide where to allocate this budget?”
You see how the situation may become a little bit difficult. You can decide to do some advertising on Google as opposed to Facebook, or both of them.
You may decide to create a very structured and solid SEO plan as opposed to run very effective MetaSearch engine activities and campaigns.
Or maybe you simply decide to do everything. But, of course ,the more you want to do, the more budget you’re going to need.
Or maybe again, you just don’t do anything simply because you can’t decide. Eventually you just look around in an attempt to see what other fellow hoteliers do and just try to copy them.
Because ultimately this is our nature, human nature: we like doing things that other people do, especially when we don’t know what to do otherwise.
And so, whilst in the previous video we talked about all the different opportunities, but also the scams that we should be aware of, in today’s video let’s go through the different types of marketing, the different marketing disciplines.
It’s like a menu with a list of dishes and you have to decide which one you want. But of course you cannot take everything, unless you have millions of dollars to spend in your marketing activities.
And for each and every of these marketing disciplines, let’s see together some of the most important pros and some of the most important cons, in order to decide how to allocate your marketing budget.
These are more coming up, so let’s dig in.
#1 SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Probably the most known discipline, the one that everyone knows, even though typically we just refer to SEO as just one discipline, deep down we have so many other sub-disciplines that can be kind of summarized with “Technical SEO” and then “Content SEO”.
Besides, SEO is the slowest yet most solid marketing activity that you can invest your money on.
And so the main pro is that SEO itself, as a marketing discipline, is free. Ranking number one on Google is not necessarily something that you have to pay for.
And the second thing is that following the best SEO practices and techniques, it means that you are an authority in your respective target or market.
In other words, you are the authority, the go-to hotel for those search terms that you want to rank for.
The cons: of course, we said before, it’s very slow, and thus if you are in the need of immediate results, well… Probably SEO is not probably the best option you have. The second drawback is that SEO can be very competitive for the very reason that we said before: it’s free and it’s the most solid marketing activity that you could adopt.
And last but not least, there are no guaranteed results. No one can say whether it will take six months, one month, one year to position and rank for certain keywords on Google, organically.
And no one knows what Google tomorrow morning in one month, in one year will change again in the algorithm that will define how websites rank in their SERP.
#2 Content Marketing (Content SEO)
We’ve just talked about it, but it’s good practice to keep it separate: Content Marketing, or Content SEO.
In short, Content SEO is all about logic. Think about it: how can you rank on Google for certain search terms if you don’t talk about those search terms?
Now, probably you see and understand how big marketing is, even though you narrow down to the specifics of the discipline, like in this case, SEO.
However, typically SEO works in great conjunction with other marketing activities, for example, advertising.
And we talked about it in a previous video that essentially advertising is an amplifier of what already works organically.
And thus, if your content is pretty much engaging for your target customers, well, that’s going to be of a great support for all of your advertising activities.
Content marketing or Content SEO is also free, but there are a lot of other pros that you could benefit from, using and adopting Content SEO, one of which is that Content SEO is evergreen.
If, for example, you write an article or a post talking about the ten most interesting and engaging things for families to do in your specific destination, well… That is going to be lasting forever.
And just like we said before, SEO as a whole, will to serve all other marketing activities as well.
#3 Google Ads
…to which we can refer to as SEM, Search Engine Marketing.
So, if you can’t wait to rank number one on Google for certain keywords, then you have to pay. But you see, either time (with SEO) or money (with SEM), you anyway have to give up on something.
So which one of these two resources would you like to use in order to be found from your potential customers?
The first pro, of course, is that it’s immediate. You don’t have to wait to get results.
The second thing is that it’s measurable to the dollar. Of course you need to have a proper tracking in place.
And last but not least, the reach, meaning the number of people that you could potentially reach out to with your campaigns is huge.
The cons, of course, is that it can be very expensive, not necessarily so much expensive, and that may vary depending on where you are, your destination, your location on the keywords and the competition… and many other factors.
And even though it can be very expensive, also the competition can be very high. The more appealing and the more volumes certain keywords get, the more competition you’re going to be having.
And of course, when we talk about competition, especially when we talk about SEM, we are not just talking about your hotel competitors, but also 3rd party channels, meaning the OTAs.
#4 Facebook ads
…which is the counterpart of Google Ads.
Facebook Ads that we can include in the bigger container called SMM or Social Media Marketing.
Now originally one of the main difference between Google Ads and Facebook Ads, or between SEM and SMM, was that Google used to be a “pull” type of advertising, whilst Facebook was originally a “push” type of advertising.
This difference is still in place, but it’s way more slim. What is still a big difference in my opinion is the context, because especially with social media marketing, well, social media are the perfect place to do advertising because of the mindset that people are when they are on social media.
And so one of the biggest pros of social media is that you can cover all the stages of the funnel, starting from the dreaming phase to the planning phase to the booking phase.
Second of all, the targeting options that you have available, especially on Facebook, are unbeatable, incredibly good.
And last but not least, also retargeting on social media typically works better.
The cons, especially in times like these, Facebook is quite unstable, especially after iOS 14.
It’s no secret Facebook is full of bugs, technical glitches, problems. It’s difficult to get quality support from Facebook and to be honest with you, also the documentation that should support advertising in order to provide them better spending, our money and give you more money eventually to Facebook actually is quite outdated.
Data wise it’s way more difficult to track and to have reliable data to work on.
First of all, because of what we just said before, re iOS14. Because of this, many people decided to opt out from being tracked and therefore there is not much data and not necessarily all reliable data that we can work with.
And second of all, we always fall into the attribution problem when it comes to social media advertising.
#5 Organic Facebook Marketing
…which still falls under the social media marketing and still Facebook, but this time organic posting.
I should say “social media” and not necessarily Facebook, but you get the point: when I talk about Facebook, I also talk about Instagram.
Engagement, entertainment and support. That’s what social media are made for.
And whilst you can decide whether you want to invest in social media advertising, what cannot be argued is your social media presence.
The first pro is that of course it’s free.
Most importantly, social media is the perfect place to build relationships and, as said, to engage and entertain people.
And last but not least, social media should be used to provide inspiration, inspiration about your locality, your destination, inspiration about what people can do when eventually traveling and staying at your place.
The main drawback though is… essentially the same: it’s quite difficult to measure.
Of course, you can track the engagement rate of your posts, you can see how many likes, how many posts shares you get, but you cannot relate whether this engagement, whether these shares, whether these comments turned into reservations later on.
#6: MetaSearch Engines
In my opinion Metasearch engine should not even be mentioned in this video, but I wanted to talk about it because you think MSE is a marketing activity or discipline; let me be crystal clear: Metasearch engine is just a distribution channel.
And the very reason is that you can get exposure and, yes, exposure may be part of marketing, but that’s exactly what hotel distribution is about: you get exposure.
The reason why I don’t consider MSE a marketing channel is because meta search engine do not and cannot provide any value: to be successful on Metasearch engines you can only leverage the only one weapon which is actually overused by all hotels, all over the world, which is the price weapon.
However, it has some pros and the best pro is that it’s the best tool that you can work with in order to be competing with the OTAs.
And the second good point is that it’s very easy to track.
I mean, there is not much that you need to do, just a very simple tracking in place and you’ll know, to the dollar, how much a search engine contributes to your direct bookings.
In the cons I put for sure the fact that in my opinion it’s totally overrated. I’m not necessarily against Metasearch engines or, at least, not all the times.
However, the fact is that you may attribute the reservations, or credit the meta search engine for reservations that you get while, ultimately, either those reservations would have flown in anyway, or on the other side, there are certainly other marketing sources and mediums that contributed to bring that reservation in.
And because of this, the problem is that it’s difficult to track their real impact.
To me always the most important thing is that MSE is just a pricing weapon, period. And therefore there is no value that you can add, just better prices.
#7 Data-driven Marketing
Now, data-driven marketing isn’t in theory a marketing discipline, for the very reason that no one can do marketing without data and, especially, without reliable data.
But I wanted to talk about it, at least very briefly, because I wanted to highlight once more the importance of using data. Even more importantly, to interpret the data.
Data is your starting and ending point, is your best friend when it comes to decide: “okay, how should I allocate my budget?”
And last but not least, how did my marketing activities or what kind of return did I get from my marketing activities? And so, any single activity that you run should be tracked, even though we have seen some of these marketing disciplines cannot be easily tracked.
As a matter of fact, when I talk about data, I never talk about data being extremely precise.
Even 80 up to 90% accuracy rate of your data is more than enough. Yet the data is consistent and based on consistency we can take proper decision.
So the main problem is that, of course, data supports every single marketing activities that you want to run and the second part is that you can work with very useful data at no or very little cost.
There are also tools that may be costing a lot, but then also they provide you with many different insights.
In the cons. one of the biggest problem, in my opinion, is the analysis-paralysis situation: getting attached to data in order to have hints, in order to give us answer or to give us an indication as to what we should be doing.
And therefore, instinctively we want to have more and more data, more and more data, more and more data, with the ultimate result that probably sometimes the data is too much that we cannot handle and digest.
And the result is either analysis-paralysis, meaning that we get stuck and we don’t know how to move forward… or the Just-Do-It situation where you are simply so much overwhelmed that you give up and you just take decisions based on your feelings.
The second problem is that interpreting data is one of the most difficult things to work with and it takes experience and it takes time.
#8 Influencer marketing
Now, I have to admit I have a sort of love-hate relationship with this marketing activity. And to be fair, I don’t want to necessarily negatively judge it, also because, like I said, I have a tiny, small, lovely part towards influencer marketing.
And the reason is that influencer marketing is basically all about faking.
Here’s the best part: if you have been following me a little bit, you know that I always (or very often) talk about value as opposed to pricing, for example.
And how I usually refer to value as a perception. Here’s the point: there is no intrinsic value in what we offer, but the influencer marketing may move the needle towards your hotel simply because the perceived value of your hotel may totally be different because someone talks about your hotel in a certain way.
For this very reason, influencer marketing can be a huge scam. Speaking of which, I am linking a post on LinkedIn that I wrote some time ago on how a specific hotel manager was actually able to reply to an influencer request, let’s put it this way, a very smart way of replying and to identify whether the influencer may be a real influencer or a fake one.
The pro is that you can really have a huge impact, really, really huge.
The second benefit is that you can have it… immediately, in no time. And more importantly, if done well, it helps create trust and credibility in the eyes of potential customers.
The cons, of course, is that it’s so easy to be ripped off by potential fakers. And the second thing is that oftentimes influencer marketing is considered a sort of quick-win solution or quick-win tactic… and quick wins, in my opinion, never win.
#9: Email Marketing
Now, if you put together 100 marketers working in 100 different business sectors and working all over the globe and you ask them: “What is the one marketing weapon that you would bring along on a desert island?”
More likely 80 up to 90% of them will reply “email”.
It’s so powerful, yet so misused, because most times we refer to email marketing as just a newsletter tool, as just a way of spreading out our offers, our packages and nothing more.
But email marketing is way more, it’s email automation, for example, it’s the confirmation email that you send to your customers the very moment they confirm a room with you, that can be turned into a marketing weapon. It’s a pre-stay email that you can use to upsell or upgrade.
It’s a post-email where in theory, if used well, you can turn a recent past customer into a new potential customer by putting them back in into your marketing flow.
The pro is that it’s free, other than the tool you’re going to be using for sending out emails, even though there are also free solutions, but the most important part is that by far email marketing is the highest converting channel.
In the cons the fact that emails can end up into spam and therefore being totally useless, but even if your emails don’t end up into any spam folder, well, most emails just create noise and when there is too much noise, it’s very difficult to stand out.
#10, IMM or Instant Messaging Marketing
In simple words, chatbots.
Now, yes, I am a big fan of chatbots because I’ve seen them working across all industries and especially in post-pandemic times they have become one of the highest converting channels.
And so with a chatbot essentially imagine you can have a concierge service 24/7 that can handle as many customers and potential customers at the same time, in real time, that may be costing you even as little as $15 per month.
I mean, do the math… isn’t it convenient?
The best part of IMM is that it’s very dynamic: it can really help you with support to your customers, with Q&As, with reservations, with requests and so on and so forth.
The other cool thing about chatbots is that you can humanise them as much as possible, even though one of the biggest mistakes, in my opinion, is that we typically attempt to turn them into human beings when they are not.
And customers know that they’re not human beings, customers know that they are dealing and they’re chatting with a chatbot, which is totally fine.
But whether you like it or not, chatbots work. The difficult thing, of course, is that we are dealing with a bot, with a robot, and therefore it may be difficult to set up because a chatbot, in theory, should be able to answer all of the questions that you get, and therefore this process may take some time.
Teaching every single answer and all the possible behaviours that the chatbot should be having in each and every situation may take a little bit of time and not necessarily be easy.
The second thing is that a chatbot is quite difficult to measure, because it’s quite difficult to get bookings via chatbot directly. However, they function as an assisted channel to other marketing sources that might be getting the reservation at the end.
And finally…
#11 Video Marketing
Probably this is the area where you can have the highest success, for the very simple reason that there is the least competition.
Very few hotels all over the world approach video marketing as a marketing discipline.
Now, we all know that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world after Google, to whom it belongs, by the way.
Yet, many people still feel uncomfortable being in front of a camera.
They don’t know necessarily how to deal with a camera and how to create a video, but videos can be of many different types and some of them have proven being very successful, thinking of, for example, lip dubs.
Just like Content SEO they are there and they are evergreen, they work forever and people can enjoy them… forever.
The other biggest pros is that if images communicate emotions way better than any descriptive word, well… videos communicate emotions way better than any images.
And so, the emotional impact is way higher than in any other way of communication that you can have in your arsenal.
And last but not least, there is no need of very complicated and advanced tools or equipment.
You can simply shoot a video with an iPhone camera or a mobile camera and that’s really it. And that’s totally fine.
And the cons, as we said, it may be difficult to produce because creating videos is not just like writing a post and therefore there are certain techniques and certain things to be following.
Conclusions
These are the different marketing activities.
I hope now you have a little bit of a better idea in terms of where you could potentially invest your money depending on how much budget you have, the time, meaning do you need immediate results or are you looking for mid-long run results?
And so this is it for today and I’ll see you again in the next video.
